Page 88 of My Unexpected Surprise
“I’m not going to stop you.” His voice is quiet, controlled, none of the urgency I half expect, half want, because some old, wounded part of me would rather he fight for this than let it go this easily. “I won’t physically stop you from leaving with our son. I am never going to be a man who does that.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“Telling you the truth, whether or not you want to hear it tonight.” I finally look up, and his expression is the most exposed I’ve seen it since the doorway four nights ago, before any of this happened, before either of us knew what the next few days would be. “If you leave now, Dante wins.”
“He already tonight, Valentino. I’m not interested in playing his games anymore.”
“I know.” He doesn’t move from the doorway. “I’m not asking you to stay for my sake. I made a mistake tonight that I don’t get to undo by asking. But leaving doesn’t protect Nico from him. It just removes the people most equipped to actually stop him.”
I don’t answer that. I finish packing in silence, and he doesn’t try to fill it, and twenty minutes later I’m carrying a still-sleeping Nico out to the car where Piper is already waiting, her expression carefully arranged into something neutral, the neutral expression she only manages when she’s furious on someone else’s behalf and trying not to make it worse.
She doesn’t ask questions. She just opens the back door, helps me settle Nico into the car seat someone thought to install days ago, and gets behind the wheel without a word.
I fall apart somewhere around the second mile, the composure I’d been holding together with nothing but adrenaline finally giving way all at once, and Piper reaches over without taking her eyes off the road and grips my hand, hard, the way she’s gripped it through every disaster since we were twenty-two.
“He thought I told Dante,” I say, when I can finally speak again. “After everything. After I told him the one secret I’ve protected for four years, his first instinct was to wonder if I’d handed it over myself.”
“That’s unforgivable,” Piper says, with the particular ferocity she reserves only for me.
“It’s not unforgivable. It’s just—” I press the heel of my hand against my eyes. “It’s exactly what I was afraid of. That the second things got hard, I’d stop being someone he trusted and start being someone he had to manage.”
I look out the window at the dark hills sliding past, the same hills I drove through on the way to the retreat four days ago, when I still believed the worst thing that could happen to me was an awkward proximity to a man I used to know only by the weight of his hand on my skin and the sound of his voice in the dark. I think about how thoroughly that fear has been replaced by a worse one, a fear with my son’s name attached to it now instead of just my own pride, and I understand in the second hour of this drive, that I am never going back to the version of myself who only had to protect one person.
“Do you think he’s right?” I ask eventually, quieter. “That leaving means Dante wins?”
Piper doesn’t answer right away, which is unlike her, and the silence stretches long enough on the dark road that I almost regret asking.
“I think,” she says finally, “that you needed to leave tonight, because staying in a room with a man who just questioned your loyalty to your own child wasn’t survivable, not after the day you’ve had. I also think Valentino Ferretti, infuriating as he currently is, might not be entirely wrong about your father. I don’t know which of those two things matters more right now. I think you get to decide that tomorrow, when you’ve slept, and not tonight, while your hands are still shaking.”
Piper is quiet for a long moment, her jaw tight, her grip on my hand not loosening.
I notice her phone light up on the console between us, a message preview flashing briefly across the screen before she reaches over and turns it face-down without comment. I catch only a fragment of it. A name, D. Calder, and the beginning of a sentence about Margaret, about the leak, before the screen goes dark.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.” Piper’s voice is too quick, too smooth, nothing like her usual unfiltered commentary. “Logistics.”
I don’t push. I don’t have the capacity tonight to push anyone about anything.
My phone buzzes in my bag before we’ve gone another mile, and I almost don’t check it, but I do, and when I read the message, my entire body goes cold in a way that has nothing to do with the night air coming through the cracked window.
Dante has filed an emergency custody claim. Citing instability. Citing the unconventional circumstances of Nico’s birth and upbringing. Requesting that Nico be placed under De Luca family protection pending review.
I read it twice, certain I’m misunderstanding something, and the second reading confirms exactly what the first one told me.
This was never just about the consortium, or the company, or even about punishing me for choosing a life he didn’t approve of.
He’s coming for my son.
Chapter Twenty-Six
VALENTINO
I read Dante’s filing twice before the words fully register, and once more to be certain my eyes haven't betrayed me.
The acquisition attempts, the exposure to Margaret Aurelius. All of it was preamble. Pressure applied to soften the ground before the actual strike. The company was never the target, Nico was always the target, and I spent the entire evening so focused on the wrong battlefield that I handed him the one thing he needed most: time.
My own distraction, and accusations that sent the boy’s mother out of my reach at exactly the moment she needed allies instead of antagonists.
